The Rest of the World Report | Good News Edition

The Rest of the World Report | Good News Edition It’s time for my favorite edition of the week!LONGPERSONOn January 8, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Tribal Council unanimously voted to grant legal rights to a river. Not metaphorically. Legally. The Longperson, known in Cherokee as Ganvhidv Asgaya, is a 790-mile waterway system that begins in the Great Smoky Mountains and ends at the sea. Under the resolution, it now holds five inherent legal rights of its own.The resolution was written and championed by the NAIWA Daughters, a group of Indigenous girls between the ages of 10 and 17. It is the first all-female-led rights-of-nature effort in US history, and only the second youth-led one ever passed by a tribal nation. It took 18 months to get there. The girls hosted community dinners. They ran surveys. They set up tables at Cherokee events. They sat down one-on-one with council members, meeting after meeting, long before the vote itself.The project didn’t stop at the vote. It has already spurred a second tribal resolution to raise money for removing the Ela Dam, a step toward restoring the river’s natural flow. On September 25, the group is hosting its annual Honoring Longperson event, bringing volunteers together to clean the river and running workshops for younger kids in the community.Source: MongabaySEVENTEEN YEARSChristian Bale has spent 17 years on one project. This week, it opened.Together California, the foster care village Bale co-founded, held its ribbon-cutting in Palmdale on Friday. Bale started researching the problem back in 2008, while filming The Dark Knight. His own daughter was young at the time, and he began thinking about what would happen to her if she were ever separated from her family. What he found was a foster system where siblings routinely get split up and placed with strangers, sometimes permanently.The village is built to solve exactly that. It has 12 three-bedroom townhomes, each designed to house up to six children together, alongside a full-time, professionally trained foster parent who lives on-site. Los Angeles County has more children in foster care than anywhere else in the country, more than 30,000 at any given time. This is the first village of its kind in the state, built specifically to keep brothers and sisters under one roof instead of scattering them across separate placements.Families begin moving in next month.Source: ABC7 Los AngelesRUKANGAMore than 800 households across eight villages in Kasigau, Kenya now have reliable access to clean water. They didn’t before.The African Wildlife Foundation rehabilitated the Rukanga Community Water Project, a pipeline and storage system that had fallen into disrepair. The Embassy of Sweden and the local county government supported the work. Before the repair, residents in villages like Zongwani, Mazola, and Chovunyi walked long distances just to find water, competing for the same scarce sources as the region’s wildlife. That competition wasn’t abstract. In a landscape shared by people and animals, water scarcity was deepening conflict between the two.The rebuilt system now serves a primary school, a junior secondary school, a senior school, a health center, and local police and chief’s stations, in addition to the households themselves. Lillian Chao, a Kasigau resident, described what changed. “Before this project, accessing water was a major challenge,” she said.For many families, the time once spent walking for water is now available for something else entirely: school, work, rest.Source: African Wildlife FoundationTHE MICAubry Alldredge has been going to fitness classes at VASA Fitness in Kaysville, Utah for years. Zumba, dance, HIGH Fitness, UpBeat Pilates. Her favorite was always UpBeat Barre, a mashup of cardio, strength training, Pilates, and yoga.This month, the 22-year-old became the first certified UpBeat Barre instructor with Down syndrome, and she wasted no time using it. She’s already taught her first class, to a room of more than 60 people. Jane Johnson, the instructor and co-owner who worked with Alldredge for years, said she’d noticed something in her long before the certification. “She has an incredible brain,” Johnson said. Johnson said Alldredge has always known the choreography cold, sometimes well enough to turn around mid-class and teach it herself.Alldredge told KSL what she loves most about the job: the mic, the room, and the people in it. “I want to help everyone feel good,” she said.She’s not just an instructor these days. She wrote a children’s book with her mother, Cindy, and her sisters, called I Have a Six Pack, a play on the fact that the family has rescued six dogs. It’s meant to spread a little of the same thing Alldredge brings to her classes: the sense that everyone belongs in the room.Source: KSLPIG ISLANDAnd finally, something we’re not going to overthink: pigs that swim.Atokos is a tiny, uninhabited private island in Greece’s Ionian Sea, a short boat ride from Ithaca. Nobody lives there. What does live there is a herd of Mediterranean black pigs. They’ve turned the place into one of the more unusual tourist attractions in the Mediterranean. Boats ferry visitors over from Ithaca, Lefkada, and Kefalonia. The pigs wade into the water on their own, paddle around swimmers, and take fruit straight from outstretched hands.Renato Bisha runs several of those boat trips a day. “The island has become viral because of the pigs,” he said, tossing fruit toward the water to draw the animals closer to his boat.Francesco Ferrari, a 22-year-old visitor from Italy, wasn’t sure what to expect the first time a pig swam up next to him. It turned out fine. “They don’t try to bite if you don’t touch them,” he said.There’s no real explanation for how the pigs ended up there in the first place. At this point, nobody seems to mind.Source: AFP via France 24Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government. — Thomas Jefferson, 1789 Get full access to The Rest of the World Report at www.restoftheworldreport.com/subscribe